


Just Keep On Trying

by JohnAmendAll



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Cake, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-06
Updated: 2012-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-30 17:30:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/334303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnAmendAll/pseuds/JohnAmendAll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nyssa and Tegan find that escaping from the Enrichment Centre is trickier, and weirder, than one might think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Keep On Trying

Tegan peered around the next corner. Another empty stretch of corridor met her eyes, its floor and walls composed of the same off-white panels that seemed to be used everywhere in this facility, and the same sterile white lighting overhead. The only feature out of the ordinary was that, about halfway down the corridor, a section of floor was missing. A flimsy-looking plastic bridge crossed this gap. 

She beckoned Nyssa to accompany her, and the two walked cautiously up to the hole in the floor. Its sides were no less panelled, off-white or vertical than the rest of the walls; the bottom probably was, too, but that could not be seen. The pit was filled to a couple of metres below floor level with a slowly rippling greyish liquid, which had an unpleasant metallic odour. 

The two looked at the pit, at the bridge, and then at each other. Nyssa shrugged, raised her portal gun, and fired twice. Two glowing blue ovals, each large enough to admit a person, appeared on the walls of the corridor; one beside them, the other at the far end of the hallway. She darted through the nearer portal, emerging at the further one. Tegan followed her closely. 

"There wasn't any need to do that," the familiar synthesized female voice said, seeming to come from all directions at once. "I'm sure the bridge would have taken even your weight. If you had crossed one at a time. And refrained from making any sudden movements." There was a pause, and it added "Reasonably sure, anyway." 

Tegan refrained from making any reply. She wasn't sure how long they'd been in this facility, but it had certainly been long enough to teach her the futility of arguing with a probably-insane artificial intelligence. Dumb insolence seemed to work as well as anything else, and was considerably easier. Instead, she followed Nyssa through the doorway at the end of the corridor. 

The room beyond was, in general terms, like the hallway: rectilinear, and covered in white panels. Another door, marked with an 'exit' sign, was about three metres up on the opposite wall. On either side of this were glass booths, each containing a button atop a waist-high pedestal. High up in one wall was a window through which a room laid out as an office, silent and empty, could be glimpsed. 

By now, both Tegan and Nyssa were sufficiently familiar with such puzzles that they didn't even break step. In less time than it takes to describe, Nyssa had placed two portals, one in the back wall of each booth, and by diving through them contrived to press both buttons within seconds of each other. The exit door opened, and in the brief time before it closed Tegan had raised her own portal gun and placed an orange portal on the ceiling of the passageway beyond it. As the door closed again, she fired her portal gun at the floor, and lowered herself through the red-rimmed oval into the passageway. In moments, Nyssa was with her. 

"Here's a fascinating fact," the voice said, as the two hurried down a flight of steps to a circular lobby. "Analysis of your performance this far suggests that a Trakenite would betray a human 17% faster than another human would. And if the human was betraying the Trakenite, it's as high as 21%. Well, I found it fascinating, anyway." 

A pair of doors slid open, revealing a lift. This time, Tegan's check that it contained nothing harmful bordered on the perfunctory. 

"How long do you think she can keep this up?" she said, as they entered the lift. 

"Longer than we can." Nyssa leaned against the back wall of the lift, and closed her eyes. "It'll only take one mistake and we're done for." 

"Statistics show that in tests of this kind, a chance event of low probability may well result in the premature termination of any test subject, no matter how high their ability," the voice put in. "Or to put it another way: How lucky do you—" 

The voice cut off with a crackle. At the same moment, the lights went out, and the lift dropped like a stone. Tegan opened her mouth to scream, but before she could do so, there was a deafening crash and the lift shook as if struck by a hammer from below. The impact threw Tegan to the floor, and for a moment she blacked out. 

The next thing she knew, she was still lying there in the darkness and silence, with her head spinning. The grip of her portal gun was digging into her side, and from the weight on her legs it seemed that Nyssa had landed on top of her. She groaned. 

"Are you all right?" Nyssa's voice asked. 

"I don't think I've broken anything," Tegan managed. The weight on her legs lessened, and she got onto hands and knees. "What happened?" 

"A power failure, I think." 

"Unless that wretched computer's messing with our minds." Tegan retrieved her portal gun, and pulled the trigger. No portal formed, but the brief orange flare illuminated the interior of the lift, giving a vague impression of crumpled walls from which the interior upholstery had come loose at various points. 

It took several more flashes before Nyssa and Tegan were both on their feet, and standing by the lift doors. The doors seemed, at first, to be completely immovable, but on the fourth attempt they grated slowly apart, opening onto a blank concrete wall. At the very top of the doorway, a narrow slit, no wider than a letterbox, admitted a dim, flickering light. 

"Now what?" Tegan muttered. "Wait until someone comes to get us out?" 

"That depends." Nyssa fired her portal gun at the concrete wall; an oval patch of it was overlaid with the familiar rippling blue glow. Then she stepped back and aimed her gun through the slit. It took several attempts, but eventually the blue glow on the wall resolved itself into an opening, through which could be seen a large, shadowy space lined with incomprehensible machines. 

With care, the women climbed through the portal, finding themselves on a walkway at the far end of the hall. The place had an air of long disuse; the paint on the railings was peeling, and a thick layer of dust covered every surface. 

"I don't know where this is," Tegan said. "But I don't think we're supposed to be here." 

"That's all to the good. I don't think we'd have lasted much longer doing what we were supposed to." 

"That won't help us much if we can't get out of here. It just means instead of drowning, we starve." 

"We'll die of thirst long before we starve," Nyssa corrected her. 

"Thanks. That really cheered me up. How are we supposed to get out of here, anyway?" 

"That looks like an access shaft, I think." Nyssa pointed. "If you put your portals there and there, and I put mine on that wall and on the floor—" she suited her actions to her words. 

"Then we just jump into your portal, and hope we got all the other ones in the right place," Tegan said, aiming her own portal gun. "I hate it when we have to do that." 

The journey that followed, through endless ill-lit tunnels and machine rooms, did nothing to improve her temper or her sense of time. After a while the lights came back to full brightness, and some of the engines they passed appeared to be operating, but the public address system remained silent. 

Tegan's various scratches and bruises, while not serious, were still a constant annoyance, and the omnipresent dust dried her throat and made talking difficult. At one point she'd started to feel light-headed, and only a quick grab on Nyssa's part had saved her from falling into the cogs of some titanic machine. Fortunately, not long afterward, they'd come across a cracked pipe from which water was trickling. After drinking her fill and washing the accumulated grime from her hands and face, Tegan had felt much more her usual self. 

That had been a while ago, though. By now she was flagging again. She sat down on an overturned turret, one of several that had, a few moments ago, been an ambush, and put her head in her hands. 

"This is hopeless," she said. "We'll never get out of here." 

"We certainly won't with that attitude," Nyssa said. She was pale, swaying and streaked with dust, but there was still resolution in her voice. "Who knows? Perhaps the exit's just the other side of that grating." 

"You still think there _is_ a way out?" Tegan replied gloomily. Nevertheless, she listlessly aimed her portal gun and fired: once through the grating, once at the floor beside her. "Here goes nothing." 

She slung the portal gun on her back, and lowered herself through the glowing hole in the floor, emerging from the wall of what appeared to be a ventilation duct. She waited for Nyssa to join her, then crawled forward. At the far end, another grille gave onto what appeared to be a large, well-lit room. She fiddled with the wingnuts that held it in place, to no avail, then unslung her portal gun again and circumvented the obstacle. In seconds, she and Nyssa were in the room beyond the grille. 

The room they were now standing in had more in common with the clean, white test chambers than the grimy, deserted subterranean world in which they had spent the past few hours. Once more, the walls and floor were composed of off-white panels, a harsh light shone from above, and a window high on one wall gave onto a deserted observation gallery. In the centre of the room was a pit filled with a dark reddish-brown substance; above it, a transparent tube, easily big enough to admit a person, protruded from the ceiling. There were only two respects in which the room differed from the test chambers they had seen earlier that day. Firstly, it lacked the illuminated, numbered wall panel listing the hazards a test subject might expect to encounter. And, more importantly, it had no exit. Other than by retracing their steps, there was no way to leave. 

"Some exit," Tegan said. "It's a dead end." 

Nyssa leaned against the wall and let herself slide downward until she was sitting. "You have to wonder about the mentality that designed this place," she said. 

"Ah, _there_ you are." the familiar synthesized voice said suddenly, sounding almost relieved. It hastily added "You were, of course, under observation the whole time as part of a standard test protocol." 

"And if we believe that, she's got a bridge to sell us," Tegan said. 

"A plastic bridge." Nyssa yawned. 

"OK." Tegan sat down beside Nyssa. "You win. You've got us right where you want us. Now what?" 

"Testing protocol requires that you be kept in ignorance of possible future testing," the voice said snippily. "Test subjects are advised to relax and conserve their strength." It paused, then added in almost seductive tones, "Maybe I'll sing you to sleep." 

Nyssa's eyes snapped open and she sat bolt upright, a grimace on her face. 

"If you are affected by parent-based issues, the Enrichment Centre offers a free counselling service," the voice continued, returning to its normal brisk manner. "If you feel this would be of value to you, apply to a Testing Associate at the main reception area. In the meantime... I have a surprise for you." 

Tegan and Nyssa exchanged worried glances. 

"Deploying surprise in three. Two. One." 

There was a rush of air, and a blond man dropped out of the tube into the pit below. In the fraction of a second before he disappeared beneath the surface whatever the pit was filled with, Tegan had time to register only two facts. Firstly, it was the Doctor. And secondly, he wasn't wearing any clothes. 

"Doctor!" she shouted. She jumped to her feet and hurried across to the edge of the pit. "Doctor!" 

"You're wasting your time," the voice said. "That pit is filled—" 

"Doctor!" Nyssa had also reached the edge of the pit. "Can you hear us?" 

The voice didn't exactly clear its throat, but there was a pointedness to its diction. "—is filled with a patented chemical formulation that not only kills humanoids instantly, but also completely dissolves their bodies. Originally distributed as a laundry additive under the product name Aperture Science Fabric Improvement Solution, it was pulled from the shelves after the discovery that it consisted of—" 

The voice wavered as the Doctor's head and shoulders emerged from the pit. 

"—carrot cake," it managed, sounding as if it couldn't quite believe what it had just said. 

Almost immediately, a second voice began to speak. Like the first, it was obviously artificial, but this one was male, and safely neutral. 

"Corruption detected in Chemical Diversity core," it began. "Shutting down for full integrity check. Some safety mechanisms will not be active during this period. Please avoid any actions likely to trigger such mechanisms. Expected downtime is sixty hours. Shutdown in ten seconds." 

There was a pause. Then the female voice remarked "I hate you all so much," and fell silent in turn. 

Tegan put her hands on her hips as the Doctor forced his way through the cake to the edge of the pit. 

"All right," she said. "Is this making sense to anybody else here? It's not just me?" 

"I'm afraid it's rather a long story," the Doctor said. He reached the edge of the pit and held out his hands. "Could you help me out, please?" 

Reluctantly, Tegan took one hand. Nyssa took the other, and they hauled the Doctor out of the pit. Tegan looked down, looked up, met the Doctor's gaze, blushed, and hastily turned away. 

"Even a short story would be better than nothing," Nyssa said, sounding quite unruffled by the thought of a naked, cake-covered Doctor within arm's reach. There was a rustle of fabric. "You'd better put this on." 

"You can look now," the Doctor said, a little later. Tegan turned, to see that the Doctor now had Nyssa's jacket tied around his waist, back to front. While this fashion choice made him minimally decent, there was very little else that could be said for it. 

"What is that stuff anyway?" she asked, gesturing at the pit. "Is it really carrot cake?" 

"I'm afraid so." 

"The power cut earlier," Nyssa said. "Did you cause that?" 

"That's right. I needed to shut GLaDOS down quickly, and I didn't have the time to pick and choose which circuit breaker to pull." 

"GLaDOS. You mean the computer, right?" Tegan asked. 

"Exactly. Anyway, while she was offline, I replaced as much of her programming with cake recipes as I could. Then when she started powering back up, I jumped into a pneumatic tube. I knew she'd try to have some sort of nasty surprise waiting for me at the other end." 

"Thanks a bunch." 

"I expect he means the cake," Nyssa said. 

"That's right." The Doctor cautiously tasted a fragment. "And I think 'nasty' is quite a good word for it. For some reason it tastes of mackerel." 

Nyssa grimaced. "That sounds disgusting." 

"I notice you're deliberately not saying anything about clothes," Tegan said. "Not that I'm obsessed with the idea of you in the nude or anything, but doesn't that merit some sort of explanation?" 

The Doctor raised his hands defensively. "I had to block one of the vents. And I didn't have anything but the clothes I stood up in. Certainly nothing as sophisticated as a portal gun." 

"That's the least likely excuse I've heard all day," Tegan said. "So what do we do now?" 

"I take it you aren't hungry?" Nyssa suggested, with a sideways glance at the cake. 

Tegan pulled a face. "I'm not eating that. Not after he's been in it. You don't know where he's been." 

"Don't worry." The Doctor made to put his arm round her shoulders, then curtailed the gesture as she backed away. "If everything goes according to plan we should be out of here in no time." 

A wind was once more blowing out of the tube through which the Doctor had arrived; this time, coming in fits and starts, rising to a shriek and then dropping back to a gentle breeze. A series of crashing sounds could be heard, at first in the distance but approaching rapidly. 

"I think we'd better stand a little back," the Doctor said. 

Hardly had they done so than the ceiling above the pit gave way. Ceiling panels, girders, cube-shaped boxes and grey spheres rained down in and around the pit. Then, with a particularly loud crunch, the TARDIS dropped through the enlarged hole, upside-down. It plunged into the pit, teetered for a moment in equilibrium, then toppled over. Reddish-orange cake and beige-coloured icing flew in every direction. 

"And there we are," the Doctor said. "Remarkable, really, what a piece of celery and a pair of trousers will do in the right place. I hope one of you's got a TARDIS key handy, by the way. I ended up swallowing mine." 

"I don't want to know how," Tegan said. "Or why. Or anything about it, really." 

"There's a key in my jacket," Nyssa added, somewhat more practically. 

The Doctor hitched up the jacket and retrieved the key. 

"Right," he said. "All aboard." 

He climbed back into the pit and began to force his way through the cake, this time in the direction of the TARDIS. Tegan and Nyssa exchanged glances, and reluctantly climbed in after him. 

"Just when I thought my day couldn't get any weirder..." Tegan muttered. 

"Ah," the Doctor said, as he reached the TARDIS. "I think we may have a problem." 

Nyssa sighed. "We're waist deep in mackerel-flavoured carrot cake. Isn't that enough of a problem to be going on with?" 

"Sadly not." The Doctor gestured at the blue bulk of the TARDIS. "When it fell over, the door..." 

Tegan drew the obvious conclusion. "It's on the bottom?" 

"That's right." The Doctor gave her a smile that might have been intended to uplift her spirits. "Brave heart, Tegan. All we need to do is dig out enough cake that we can get down to it. There ought to be something here we can use as a shovel. And we shouldn't be disturbed for the next few hours, at least." 

The two thrown lumps of cake hit him almost simultaneously.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a little surprised that the genre of [cake!fic](http://www.whofic.com/series.php?seriesid=2338) (in which, for the best of reasons, the Doctor ends up naked and covered in cake) hasn't had a crossover with the world of Portal before now.
> 
> The details of this particular example were inspired by a forum post by Evelyn discussing this genre:
>
>>   
> And why are the only neekid + cake-covered Doctors 10 and 3? Why can't we have nekkid-Five covered in beige-colored frosting? (carrot cake, of course. Five would have to be covered in carrot cake)  
> 


End file.
